Learning Nerd’s Diary #102
Welcome back Learning Nerds!
I’ve spent the last 2 weeks traveling for field research after a LONG time! I spent time visiting institutes, talking to teachers and learners and fully doing only one thing -
It seems only fair that I spent this week’s diary on that!
👀 Sneak peak
Here is what I have in store for you this week -
💭 Learning About Learning: Context-driven LxD - A Framework
💥 Coolest Thing I Learnt This Week:
The Power of Context
Transfer Knowledge to New Context
Explanations
🔦 Spotlight: Research for Learning
Let's jump right in!
💭 Learning About Learning
The biggest mistake we make as learning designers?
Not spending enough time understanding the context.
My co-founder and friend, Harsh Doshi keeps saying -
“Anything that is context-less is meaningless”
We spent the last 2 weeks doing on-ground research for a project that we’ve been working on.
Here is the framework we built to help us understand our context better and the tools we used to synthesise all the information.
🧑🏻🎓 Learner
❓Questions to answer:
Who is our learner?
What are the biggest challenges they face in their life?
What motivates them?
What do they aspire to become?
What do their days look like?
How much time do they realistically have to learn?
Who influences them?
What are the patterns of behaviours that we’ve seen across learners?
🛠️ Tools for synthesis:
🏫 Institute/ Organisation
❓Questions to answer:
Who are the different stakeholders in the institute/ organisation?
What hierarchy exists within these?
What influences each of these stakeholders?
What motivates each of these stakeholders?
What does the learning environment look like?
What is the learning culture?
What are the available resources?
🛠️ Tools for synthesis:
🌏 Ecosystem
❓Questions to answer:
What is the larger ecosystem in this space?
What has been the evolution of this space historically?
What are trends that are emerging?
Who can influence ecosystem-level changes?
What are key opportunities?
🛠️ Tools for synthesis:
When we started asking ourselves & the team these questions we realised that there were so many blind spots. You need to find ways to discover and unpack these BEFORE you get to the design phase!
💥 Coolest Thing I Learnt this Week
The Power of Context
Ross talks about the relationship between content & context in his article. If I were to sum it up in just one line, it would be -
Content needs context to make a meaningful impact.
There are so many nuggets in the article!
Transfer Knowledge to New Context
One of the best ways to learn is to apply what you’ve learned in different contexts. This article offers some great examples and recommendations on how you can include that in your learning experiences.
Explanations
Pretty self-explanatory!
🔦 Spotlight
Many moons ago I wrote an article on how to leverage research for learning focussing on 2 parts:
Building the right course - focused on the what and why
Building the course right - focused on the how
Love & Learning
Until we meet next week, remember to -
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